Anyway, I’ll start with the meditation along those lines because I have so many people personally affected right now. And so many of you, as your country’s come up, I think, oh yeah, things are happening there too. And things are happened there too. So let’s start with the people who are scared, homeless, bereaved, wounded. Let’s get our meditation out and brush it off. The one that begins, I did this morning, it always works: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Look at whatever’s in front of you. And then, can I imagine the space between me and the object I am looking at? Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the base of my skull? Can I imagine the volume inside the atoms of my body, which is almost entirely made of space? Can I imagine the space inside what I call my body? Can I imagine the space connecting me with the bodies of every other person on this recording? Whether I’m seeing it live or recorded later, can I imagine the space and time connecting us? Because it is one thing. Can I imagine the silence under everything that sounds? Under all the noise, under all the noises of sorrow and destruction and terror, there is a silence holding us. There is a stillness that holds all this action in a matrix of love, of awareness, of consciousness that is free from time and space, but fills all time and space. Can I imagine the love in my heart reaching every part of the silence, the stillness, and the space that we call the universe?

And can I imagine the silence, the stillness, and the space filling the hearts of those who are hurting with comfort and with protection and with gentleness It holds us all.

So that’s a bit like a prayer for all of those of us who are hurting. And it doesn’t have to be in a natural disaster. You just might be lonely today or tired. Yesterday I was incredibly tired and it wasn’t an easy day. And if that’s the worst thing that’s happening to you, you’re a very lucky person like I am. But you still get to call on the silence and the stillness and the space that wants to love you to a place of being absolutely a hundred percent wonderfully.

Okay? All right. So we’ve been thinking a lot. Well, we’ve been singing a lot in our house lately about wayfinding. Some of you who’ve been through my coach training or who know of it may recall that it used to be called the Martha Beck Life Coach Training, which made me feel icky in my tummy, and I renamed it Wayfinder Life Coach Training because it’s in its essence, it’s based or tries to be based on the wisdom of many generations of humans in many parts of the planet who had their own ways of finding a path through whatever terrain they lived in.

It could be a forest, it could be a desert, it could be the ocean. And in particular, the most “oceanest” of all the ocean people were the explorers who set out from Indonesia, Papua, New Guinea, that whole range of that whole archipelago that comes down south of Asia, and found their way to islands like Hawaii that were 3,000 miles off in open water. They found them, they expected to find them before they actually, they didn’t just stumble on them. They knew by their incredibly intelligent connection with the water, the way it moved with the weather, with the stars, with the animals of the ocean, they could interpolate the existence of islands thousands of miles away because they knew all these patterns so well.

So an anthropologist named Wade Davis, I think, called these people wayfinders, which is a word he coined and I expropriated, but it’s also used in the Disney film, Moana, which is about a child on an island that is populated by the descendants of wayfinders. And they don’t use the word wayfinder very often in the movie, but they do use it. And the fact that our 4-year-old Lila has become obsessed with Moana and with wayfinding really tickles me. It feels like one of those little fractal forms that comes up in our lives where I think about wayfinding, I teach wayfinding as a coach, as a metaphor for coaching, and then this little kiddo who’s never heard me talk about coaching at all is running around the house yelling, “There’s a line where the sky meets the sea and it calls me.” She just is into this wayfinding stuff and it’s not going away.

And it made me think about something that a scientist named Rupert Sheldrake calls morphic fields. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of either one of those things, but Rupert Sheldrake is one of those annoying scientists that other scientists love to laugh at, but he won’t go away because his research is so good. It’s robust, it’s replicable, it’s just a little weird. Rupert Sheldrake wanted to know why things are shaped the way they are shaped. Why does life shape itself the way it does? Why are trees shaped like trees? Why are people shaped like people? Why does behavior replicate?

He went wayfinding into the structure of the universe, and what he decided was at work here was something called a morphic field. Morph means shape, and field is kind of an open space. So I was thinking about how, sorry, I just got off track. The morphic fields that Rupert Sheldrake talks about, he says that one of their characteristics is they create things in hierarchies. Like there’s a little morphic field that helps a cell maintain its shape, and then there’s another morphic field that contains that cell, but it might be one of the skin cells in your body. And there are other cells, there are other fields, rather, that are holding you that might characterize the skin of the Earth. There are different, different shapes that replicate in many different ways and at many different places.

So I was thinking when we go wayfinding, we are going toward a morphic field. And I thought, I call it wayfinding, but I never tell people what they’re finding their way toward except maybe the purpose of your life. People think when they go to a life coach that they’re going to learn how to find the field of wealth or the field of perfect relationship or the field of perfect health. And that’s absolutely true. I mean, I really, really think that you can use those methods. I mean the meditation we just did is one of those methods, like to go in and start to see yourself with space consciousness instead of matter consciousness. It puts you in a state of mind where your mind is open, your mind becomes a kind of field of openness that is receiving things that resonate with the stillness, the silence, and the space.

And that resonance is very still, it’s very powerful, it’s very charged with awareness and life. It’s not at all inert, it’s vibrant with life. So when I teach coaches to help themselves and then other people like, get the house they want, it looks as if we’re serving society’s values. But actually the methodology of going into the self and finding the way by the compasses inside our bodies, hearts, and minds, that always also is taking us to another place. It is wayfinding us to something I call the new consciousness.

And a lot of people, not just me, are calling it the new consciousness. And I thought about the ways in which I’ve described it, and if you follow me, I’ve talked about, I always knew that I would be part of a shift in the way humans think, in the way we process consciousness, the way we use our consciousness. But whenever I tried to think what it would look like, I would get the answer, “Wait without thought for you are not ready for thought,” which was a quote from T.S. Elliot.

Well, lately I think we might be a little more ready for thought because there are all these different ideas that are converging. and they’re merging into one sort of image. They’re a field in Rupert Sheldrake’s terms, but people call them different things. For example, my friend Maria Shriver, who is also my publisher, where is that book of mine? I just wrote a book and it’s out there, it’s called Beyond Anxiety. And if you look at the spine of that book, you’ll see that it’s coming from Open Field Publishing, and it has a picture of a horse running on a field. And this is something that this image here, that horse in the field, is something that Maria has been talking to me about for I think like fifteen years.

Fifteen years ago I made her make a vision board and she was like, “Oh my God, really?” And I was like, “Yes, really.” And all that was on her vision board was this field with a horse on it. And she got the poem by Rumi that goes: “Out beyond concepts of rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” So that’s Rumi’s field. She called hers the open field. When she took over as publisher of my books, I became an Open Field publisher. I did not know that when I was going into writing the books.

And then I also recently ran across, from many directions, people have been telling me, “You need to go listen to this podcast called the Telepathy Tapes.” Now like Rupert Sheldrake, these, the episodes of this podcast are being sneered at by the scientific because they don’t fit our current materialist version of the world. What they are in a nutshell—I don’t want to ruin ’em for you, you should really go listen to them—they feature a number of people who for many years of their lives were not verbal. So I think autism is the diagnosis for most of them, but the point is that they’re not very verbal, but there are ways of helping them become verbal. And that’s what the podcast is about. And basically it says, and in my opinion, very, very logically and robustly, it says these human beings have been able to communicate with each other and understand what the people around them were saying through pure telepathy.

Now, Rupert Sheldrake, when I looked him up for this before I did this broadcast, and you just Google Rupert Sheldrake and it talks about morphic fields and the things that that morphic fields explain, like why a cell is shaped the way a cell is shaped and your arm is shaped the way an arm is shaped.

It’s also, it has evolutionary information in it. It has something called non-local resonance where we can actually feel the patterns of things that our parents and grandparents experienced. They’ve actually shown that in, for example, research on the descendants of Holocaust survivors. And as part of the just ordinary, this is what this theory accounts for, it says it’s an explanation for telepathy. And in Wikipedia it says, which I know is not real science, it’s just what people put there. But I love this. “Morphic fields are thought to help provide an explanation for telepathy, which is common between people, especially people who know each other well.” And it doesn’t even say this is not a proven thing and we should probably take him out behind a building and beat him with sticks. They just go, “Telepathy, which is common.”

The way Rupert Sheldrake started his career was in an experiment called Dogs Who Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. They put all these dogs in a warehouse with cameras everywhere. He would randomly call an owner to come get the dog. At the point that the owner formed the intention to come get the dog, that dog would be on film going to the door and waiting for the owner. So this idea that we can feel each other, that we are sharing morphic fields and that they connect ,this to me today, came together with the idea of Maria’s open field, Rumi’s field beyond concepts of rightdoing and wrongdoing, and something mentioned on the Telepathy Tapes. I’m not going to ruin it for you. Ro said, “Don’t ruin the Telepathy Tapes. They are well told, just leave them as they are.”

But I will tell you that in the course of doing all these podcasts and going everywhere and meeting different people, many of whom have been non-speakers or are still non-speakers but communicate other ways, the person who made the podcast heard over and over that these people were going to something that one called “the Talk on the Hill.” And they say, “I’m going to the hill.” This one boy would go in his bedroom, close the door, put pillows on his head, and go to the hill to talk to other people who couldn’t speak out loud.

The hill is the field, is the open field. Some of you may have seen a little thing I recorded a few weeks ago about something I call “the pyramid in the pool,” that we have a rigid pyramid-shaped structure in society, but it’s standing in a pool of enlightenment, and the forces of enlightenment are gradually dissolving the pyramid from the bottom up. This is the first time, this is the first day of my life that I sat down and thought, wait, the new consciousness is a place. It’s not just a state of consciousness, it’s a place of consciousness. Just like The Gathering Room is a place. It’s not a place in the sense that my desk is a place, but it is a place in the sense that my desk is connected with whatever you are using to watch this broadcast because I’m sitting at it, I’m touching it, you’re connected to me and you’re sharing a morphic field with me and all the people, all the place names I read as you all came up from all over the globe.

We are talking on the hill, we are in the field, we are in the open field. The interesting question is, can we do it without words? And I deeply believe the answer is yes. Having spent 36 years with a son who is barely verbal and having the privilege of hanging out with other people like him, I can tell you the sensation of connection and telepathy between many of these people and between those of us who get to hang out with them, and between us and them, between us and each other, you don’t talk too much about it because they’re going to take you back behind the gym and hit you with shovels with Rupert Sheldrake.

Nevertheless, this persists. And yet we persist in having a hunch that the talk on the hill is real. The open field is a place we can go now. The Rumi’s field has Rumi in it. When I wrote The Way of Integrity, Dante was in the freaking room with me. I dreamed about him at night and I would see him as I was writing. The morphic field was reaching through space and time just as Sheldrake hypothesizes. And I say, why not find our way there?

Wayfinding, if you do the coaching stuff that I do, you’ll end up in the field. If you come to the community that Ro and I run called Wilder, that’s another place where people go to talk in the field. If you open yourself to the direction of the compasses inside your body, heart, mind, and soul, they will take you directly to the field. And while you’re there, they will deliver you to different physical places and physical experiences.

I do not feel that I am being very articulate about this today. It’s a difficult concept to put into words, especially with all the ways it’s being triangulated in my mind right now. But thank you for listening. And now I’d like to go to some questions.

So Buddhafied says, “My mom lives four houses down now. We’ve been trying to figure out how her little Pomeranian starts barking for me before I even get to her house. It’s irregular times, but she seems to always know.”

Absolutely. I once spent the better part of a night talking to a very psychologically altered person who was on the faculty of Yale. And I thought okay—we did a plant ceremony together—I thought, “What will this really sophisticated social scientist say about this kind of wacky fringe thing we’re doing?” And I thought he would spend his time criticizing and being intellectual, and instead he pretty much forced me to sit quietly for three hours while he talked about a dog he had once owned when he was a student at Yale who knew everywhere he would be. He could say to this dog, “Meet me at Alice’s house.” And even if the dog had never been to Alice’s house, the dog would go meet him at Alice’s house. And he was like, this dog—he was like, “This dog was fully psychic, understood everything. I said. How am I supposed to tell people at Yale about this?” And it was like a secret this wonderful man had been holding onto and oh, we had such a sweet night because we didn’t have to pretend there is no field. All right, thank you, Buddhafied. That’s fantastic.

Samita Needleman says, “Can there be numerous fields that are all created around safety and love?”

Yes, I believe that each of us is not only a morphic field, but a morphogenic field. That is, we give birth to the shape of ourselves. And everything that we learn from our individual perspective, things that you’re learning right now in your body, wherever you are, things that I can only learn from inside this body where I am, we are generating a perspective that it’s like we’re making these beautiful movies that we can show to each other. I will believe that consciousness is in love with stories and in love with experiences, and it loves the tragedies as well as the comedies. It loves the adventure stories as much as it loves the rom-coms, and it likes to see it through every single one of our eyes. I think it’s just, it wouldn’t pass up a single experience that we’re having. So we are creating overlapping fields, morphogenic fields, of love and experience, and they’re all unique, but they’re all beautiful. It’s like snowflakes. They’re a form of pattern disorder, which is what happens when you allow chaos to have its head in our physical universe. We say chaos like it’s massive destruction, but actually chaos is the glory of galaxies and a mother dog giving birth to puppies. And the way snowflakes are framed, the way clouds look similar but different. And every puppy this mother dog has will look like that breed of dog, but only like itself. There are so many delicious fields being generated on this planet and who knows how many others, I don’t know. But I know that you’re the center of one of ’em. And I know you are infinitely precious in that regard. And you don’t have to change one thing. You also don’t have to believe this.

Krsk78 says, “We are going to need the full story on Dante showing up as you wrote The Way of Integrity.”

 Okay, so I’m reading, if you read The Way of Integrity, I was standing on the shoulders of a giant, Dante Alighieri from the 14th century was, I think, one of the most brilliant psychologists and mystics in history. And I think he had an enlightenment experience and he was trying to guide us through it by writing The Divine Comedy, which is why it’s considered the greatest work of literature in history by many people. So I’m reading five or six different translations of The Divine Comedy, plus reading the Italian even though I don’t read Italian. But after you’ve read seven translations, you pretty much follow it. So every single day I would be just neck-deep in Dante’s work and his thinking and his metaphors. And there’s only one painting that I saw of him. He had a very hooked nose and they show him in profile with a red hat on. But I would dream that I was with this very joyful, articulate, very, I would have these dreams and he would be this beautiful man. And he moved all the time. He was so alive, he was so full of joy and his body was very real in the dream. And I would wake up and feel like that person was still in the room with me. And I’d start to write and I got to the end of the book. Several times during the book he would describe something that made no sense at all and then I would experience it suddenly while I was meditating or while I was writing, the room would disappear and I’d be in showers of light and stuff. It was pretty radical. I wrote some of those things in and my editor put in the third time I talked about it, she’s like, “We have seen you erupt in this way before.” All right, I’ll take them out. But she didn’t like that. 

But at the end, the whole Divine Comedy is written in past tense, right? “I did this, I did this. I went through hell, went through purgatory, then I climbed up through paradise.” But at the very end, Dante switches into the present tense. And he talks about going to the Source of everything and it’s this unfolding—he compares it to a rose of light. In Asia they compare it to a lotus, same image. And he goes, he has this overwhelming desire to go into it. And as he steps into it, he says, “And now I become one with the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” And as I typed those words, I saw that profile of Dante and it turned and it looked straight into my eyes, and I felt like my mind was exploding and I could see all the things that had happened, the plague, the discovery, the colonization of America, the moon landing, the nuclear war, everything. And it was just like I was looking across this time-space at this face full of such intelligence and compassion and wisdom and love, and I just sobbed. I just was like, because he changes to present tense because he knows when you get that far and you’ve understood it, it’s not he wrote it then—he’s writing it now. Because we’re all just now, and time is only an illusion of our linear minds. Sorry that was a really long story, but you did say you needed the full story!

Ellis says, “How to be open to telepathy, but not to dark energies?”

Really good question. Anything dark that comes into your life will have a story that goes with it. And the story will be one that makes you anxious, fearful, depressed. So this is why I ended up writing Beyond Anxiety after The Way of Integrity because some of my clients were trying to live in integrity, but they were scared and they couldn’t shake it. And it was causing them to enter dark fields. They always taste of fear, right? The light fields always taste of love, and the darkness always tastes of fear. And they’re both to be loved. There’s much love I have for a person who’s in fear as a person who’s in bliss, but it’s not fun to experience. So all you have to do, and I learned this from Parts Psychology as well, if you want to talk to a part of yourself or a part of the morphic fields of the universe, you just say, “Please let me have this experience but not be overwhelmed by anything dark.” And if I feel like I’m going in a direction that’s dark, I’m going to turn immediately. That’s wayfinding. That is the coaching I teach. If you feel joy and openness and freedom threading larger, you go toward whatever you’re looking at. If you feel fear and constriction and darkness of a negative type, you just don’t go there. It’s that simple. And that’s how we find our way to the hill where we have the conversation.

And oh yeah, that’s another thing I want, before you go, I was going to tell you, we’re doing a deep dive into the anxiety book in the Wilder community. So for a whole year we’re going to look really, really deeply at each part of my breakdown of how you get out of fear mode. And the moment you do it, so the first quarter of the book, the first third of the year, is going to be about freeing ourselves from anxiety and fear and coming into a place of love and security and safety to stay. But the last two thirds of the book, end of the year, are going to be about what happens when we unleash the morphogenic fields inside our minds and then inside our souls. And it’s going to go from, yeah, it’s going to from a scary place, wayfind to a happy place, and then wayfind to a place you will not believe, it’s so amazing.

So thank you for joining me on the hill. Listen to the Telepathy Tapes, it’s worth it. And look up Rupert Sheldrake. He’s a hero in my book. I love you all so much. Thank you for dropping by onto the open field. Which is everywhere we are! I love you. Bye-bye.